Update

TL;DR:

We're proposing a new area called Teams. The goal is to allow groups (of varying sizes) to publicly share about themselves (who they are and what they build) on Stack Overflow. Content can include information about The Team (Overview, Meta Information), a member roster, projects, community interaction (Questions), and recruitment (Jobs, Get Involved). Team affiliations will be reflected in your user profile.

Documentation is one of those ideas. Teams is another, and that’s what we’re excited to share with you today.

Huh? Teams?

First let me state what Teams are and why we’re excited about them:

Teams are a new way to share your knowledge with the world. This includes what you build, who you build it with, answers to questions about how you build it, and how others can get involved. These groups can vary in size from a few people working on a small open-source project to companies and sub-teams within those companies.

Here’s why we’re excited about teams:

Teams allow for a new kind of Q&A that wouldn’t be allowed right now

Teams let you show off more of what you do professionally

Teams help you hire developers or recruit for your open source project

How does adding Teams to Stack Overflow solve this?

It introduces a new kind of Q&A.

Teams addresses a need the community wanted solved from the beginning, but didn’t fit in our original Q&A. Documentation is our attempt to help the community address questions which would typically be considered too broad. Teams is our attempt to address items which typically are considered too localized.

What do we mean by "too localized"? Well, let’s start off with what we don’t mean. Questions such as "please fix my codes" will still not be allowed. Instead, we’re looking to provide a place for questions such as:

"How does [Company X] run PostgreSQL at an enterprise scale?",

"What's a typical budget for [Company Y] when they upgrade their data centers?", or

"How does [Company Z] keep their distributed team working together even though they’re spread across multiple time zones?"

These are interesting questions which don’t have room in the community right now. These questions allow us to start sharing how various teams have arrived at solutions others can learn from.

It lets you show off more of what you do professionally.

Your user profile lets you show off your own achievements: what you have done on Stack Overflow, who you are, how you’re involved. Teams are an extension of your profile by letting you now share about your team, what you’re building, who’s working on it with you, how you’re solving problems, and how people can get involved.

It helps you hire and recruit other developers.

After salary, two of the top job search considerations for developers are team culture and what they’re building. But, despite that, job listings are typically dry and boring lists of requirements, responsibilities, and expectations. A short team blurb might be included, but it may not even represent the development team fully. Teams can cut through that by giving developers a fuller picture of the team, created by the team.

Inversely, if you’re looking for a job, now you have one place you can go to learn about a team, their culture, what they’re building, and who’s involved. Maybe this information is the motivation you needed to apply or maybe it helps you feel more secure in your possible decision to join the team. Or, maybe it’s the info you need to realize just how miserable you’d be working with that team. Either way, Teams can help you make more informed decisions.

We Need Your Help

This is the first step, sharing where we’re at. We’ve been thinking about what Teams on Stack Overflow look like, what they can offer, and how they might behave; but now we need your feedback. We’re still in the early stages, but we believe involving the community is vital to strong, successful ideas.

The second step will be a private beta, where the community will use this in ways that we never dreamed of or intended test things out and identify where we need to work harder. The private testing timeline is the obligatory six-to-eight weeks. A sign-up form will be at the end, so please keep reading.

The Proposal (On How Teams Will Work…Initially)

We've got a lot of crazy ideas for these pages, and probably won't have a clue which makes sense until you give us some feedback, but here’s what we think the first version will look like:

Teams are open-ended…for now. Meaning we aren't prescribing how they should be used. We reserve the right to change this, but we're interested in seeing what people create teams for and how they organize them.

Teams are self-forming. We aren’t going to create them. That’s up to you. They can be of any size…even 1 person.

Anyone can sign up and join a team. We’ve considered having a required rep level to create a team, but want anyone to get involved with a team if they want to. So for now, we’re starting without a requirement. If chaos ensues, then we’ll revisit this area...

Teams are formed around groups of people and the projects they work on. Most likely this will mean companies (i.e. Stack Overflow, HBO, etc.), sub-teams within companies (i.e. the Trello mobile team, the Microsoft Excel team, etc.), organizations (i.e. Mozilla, W3C, etc.), or open-source projects (i.e. KVM, ASP.NET MVC, etc.).

Teams can share how they work and what they’ve learned. What’s your tech stack? What’s the purpose of your team? What projects do you work on that you’re excited about? How can people join your team?

Joining a team is public. We are not doing private teams. The goal here is to share information, not hide it behind some secret curtain. When you join a team, you’re added to the team’s roster. Eventually we will also add a list of teams you’re a member of onto your profile, but it won’t be in the beta.

People can only ask questions about the team on the team page. Wait, does this mean Stack Overflow is a social network? Emphatically no. You cannot directly message a particular team member or start random discussion questions. When a new question is created, the team will be notified through their inbox that a new question has come in. If teams receive too many questions, we will explore rolled up notifications or other ideas. Once notified, anyone on the team can answer the question. If the team feels it’s a question that should be on Stack Overflow, they can move that question out into the general questions area.

As far as mechanics are concerned, right now we are thinking that the only things that will be different with team questions are that you will not be able to earn reputation (from asking or answering questions) or offer bounties. Up and downvoting questions/answers, comments, flagging, deleting, and admin functionality will all still apply.

Team questions will be kept on team pages…for now. For the time being, we don’t want to clutter the community with questions most people can’t answer.

This is all great and all, but do you have anything else planned for Teams?
Well, yes. Yes, we do. It’s still early and everything is subject to change as we move along and hear to your feedback. But we have considered other ideas as well. They are:

Projects. A place where teams can share about projects and the challenges they face(d) while working on them.

Team Artifacts. Blog articles, conference talks, podcast episodes. All the various things that feature your team but that’s strewn across the worldwide interwebs.

Team Opportunities. Have an opening on your team? Want developers to know how to get involved with your open-source project? We’ll provide an area where teams can list job opportunities or sign-up instructions.

Following Teams. Stay up-to-date when teams answer a new question, update or post a new project, post a new job, or anything else that updates their page.

Team Rep & Badge Totals. Show off your team’s brilliance within an aggregated reputation and badge area.

Top Questions & Answers. What are the top questions and answers for the team?

Team Timeline. View a team’s activity within one default view. What questions has the team answered? What questions and answers have team members written within the community? New team members. New projects and project updates. New job opportunities. All of this within one view that you can easily scan and catch up on a team’s activity.

FAQs

Can you earn reputation answering team questions?

No. Much like answering questions on Meta, answering team questions is also a reputation-less activity. Badges could potentially be earned however. More details on this will follow.

Will you be able to vote on questions and answers?

For now we will allow normal upvoting and downvoting, but mainly because we want to see how voting differs here versus community questions. If we identify areas which could be tweaked, we will address those then...

What if someone asks a coding question on a team page?

There will be an easy way to move it into regular Q&A.

Will I be able to send a private message to a team member?

Nope. We still have no intention of becoming a social network.

Who can join a team page?

Initially people will be able to join team pages through one of two options:

A unique URL link which would grant you access into the team.

You will be able to set an email address domain, allowing anyone who has a valid email address to join your team.

Looking ahead we also foresee other ways people can join teams:

Being invited by other team members.

When adding roles, schools, or projects onto your profile, you will be asked if you would like to join the team at that time.

When linking a GitHub or open source project to your profile, you’ll be asked to create or join a team page at that time.

Who can create a team?

Initially anyone can create a team page. You will be able to create a team from the Teams “Overview” page. Eventually you will also be able to create a team from your user profile page when you add a job role, school, or project.

Who can edit the team’s summary information?

Any team member can edit a team’s overview, meta information, team members, and projects. We will maintain a historical record of these changes so they can be rolled back in the event something was changed that shouldn’t have been changed.

Beta Registration

If you would like to help us test this out, please sign up at the form link below. We will need to know the following things about you:

Your Stack Overflow profile URL

Your email address

Your team name

Your team size (team size especially helps us because we will want to see how teams of varying sizes will utilize the team page).

Users can be part of multiple teams, right? Like, a company and an Open Source project?
– PekkaOct 6 '15 at 20:10

277

You managed to write at least three quarters of this post with breathless "this is revolutionary, this will change Q&A forever" language before actually saying what teams are. I'm still not entirely clear what they are. It almost sounds like you just want a new SE site where each tag wiki represents a team rather than a concept. Why does this require an entirely new application?
– davidismOct 6 '15 at 20:10

177

Are you going to try to authenticate teams? How are you going to prevent a bunch of people from creating "Jon Skeet's team" or "MSDN"?
– ryanyuyuOct 6 '15 at 20:11

Team Rep & Badge Totals - Will they still be useless Internet points when they can impact not just a person's but an organization's real world reputation? What happens when people on the same team start up voting each other's posts? Is it not a problem as long as it's not serial voting?
– BSMPOct 6 '15 at 20:34

I'm a little skeptical. Are you going to have somebody reach out to every person who creates a team to vet them? What keeps me from starting a Microsoft Works team? Can other people join the team? Can they create teams with the same name? Will there be a race for people to register names like "Google"? If Google comes along and wants to start a team, are they going to be able to "steal" the name from whoever has it?
– meagar♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:44

I was on the fence about Documentation, but this proposal makes the Documentation proposal look absolutely amazing in comparison. I have my doubts that teams will scale well to the entire StackExchange network (although I could be wrong) and I fear that they will either be a) misused b) abused or c) neglected. Perhaps I'm too skeptical or I lack the vision that the SO team has, but upon reading this proposal, I'm asking myself: "What am I really going to DO with this feature?" I don't think it offers that much.
– jedd.ahyoungOct 7 '15 at 3:57

I'll admit that this idea strikes me completely wrong. Documentation still fits in with what I feel the culture of SO to be, that of creating information to make the internet a better place. We're already drowning in social sites and places where we can "connect" with others. SO, and SE in general, are one of the few user-driven communities on the internet that's about something concrete: an archive of information and a place to get help. Add this to Careers, where it belongs, not to SO.
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 16:59

102

This feature does not advance the mission statement of Stack Exchange. Please remember why we're here: "...to build a library of detailed answers to every question about programming." Doing things just because we can is actively detrimental to that goal, and will worsen Stack Exchange's long-term success. Either explicitly change the mission statement, or - preferably - please don't do this.
– user1131435Oct 8 '15 at 0:04

87

I'm voting to close this feature as off-topic because it's not about programming, it's a social network.
– BoannOct 8 '15 at 14:39

29

Something tells me that this is going to be implemented regardless what anyone says here. "They" are excited about it.
– zxq9Oct 9 '15 at 2:57

42 Answers
42

As much as I know folks have been clamoring for this for ages, I gotta say... This scares me a little bit. It may not be a full-on "social network", but it's a big step in that direction - and I'd be shocked if it didn't bring with it some of the known problems endemic to systems that attempt to capture social graphs. We'll learn how to deal with these along the way no doubt...

Things to be wary of

Interpersonal conflicts
Any time there's a self-organized group of people, a pecking order starts to develop - and sometimes all the blood and feathers become too much. This shouldn't be too much of a problem for teams that correspond to groups within organizations that already have mechanisms for handling this: HR departments, codes of conduct w/ specific procedures for handling violations, etc. But for those that don't, we'll likely need to develop our own. What happens when someone gets kicked out of a team? What happens when someone is being overbearing in handling team questions? What happens when the SOian People's Front team clashes with the People's Front of SO team?

The bad kind of collaboration
When folks band together to solve a problem, it is a beautiful thing - a group can accomplish so much more good than any individual. But sometimes folks band together to cause problems... And the same group power applies to that as well.

The lights are on but nobody's home
Once the novelty wears off, there will be teams that just... leave. Stop answering questions, stop logging in, just disappear without a trace. This is mildly annoying when it's your neighborhood mailing list, but considerably more embarrassing for everyone when it's a big team at a major company that puts the link on their main developer page one day and then disappears into the ether the next. Not that I expect this totally hypothetical scenario to occur soon, but we'll want to watch for it.

Things to be excited about

Like I said, this scares me a bit... But there's much to be hopeful of as well:

Product supporthas been a pain-point for quite a while. Conveying the message that it's ok to encourage and answer programming questions about your product while absolutely essential that you discourage customer support questions is hard; actually doing this seems to be even harder. Having a system where you can direct all questions about your team's product and then filter them as-needed would be both a boon to organizations already engaged in supporting their work on SO and a blessed relief to the good folks who currently have to deal with the mistakes. Quite honestly, I think this is a bigger source of strain than anyone quite realizes - if this plan accomplished nothing else, it would be worthwhile for this reason alone.

Team building via Stack Overflow participation is something that's currently neither encouraged nor particularly obvious... Yet when I first signed on, several of my co-workers at the time found the site to be a great way to get to know each other better: sometimes you just don't realize the depth of your peers' knowledge until you get to see them participating in an environment where they're free to ask and answer the questions that truly interest them.

"and then filter them as-needed"... sure, but people will ask at a wrong place. The post addressed moving questions from Team to general Q&A, but who'll get to decide on moving them in the opposite direction?
– user3717023Oct 6 '15 at 21:36

3

I gotta think that'd be a recipe for disaster, @MiceElf: take all the problems we have surrounding migration now, and add hundreds/thousands of new destinations... Ever spend an hour in someone's phone system getting transferred between departments? Like that only with more bureaucracy.
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 21:38

11

Now that you mention it, product support is a huge win from this proposal and actually seems (to me) to be more compelling than the motivation to allow more localized questions.
– josliber♦Oct 6 '15 at 21:44

11

I think Teams may well stand or fall on the product support aspect. If it works then it would appear to be a good way to organise this. The customer support questions stay in the team, but the developer ones get migrated to SO.
– ChrisF♦Oct 6 '15 at 21:46

8

Since you envision Teams as a place for customer support, and there will be a way to move real questions to SO, will there be a way to move support questions to a Team, before it gets downvoted into oblivion and the user loses interest/gets angry? If we encourage customer support on a Stack Overflow related product, it's guaranteed that many will misinterpret this and make those posts on main.
– davidismOct 6 '15 at 21:51

13

If this takes off, there are gonna be waaaaay too many teams for that to be feasible, @davidism - the last thing I wanna see is folks fighting over who gets a question. A better solution will probably be to direct users who aren't already familiar with SO directly to your team page, and then just free the programming questions once you've had a chance to review them - that's gonna be a better experience for your users even when the questions start out on-topic!
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 21:55

15

I was enthusiastic at first about the idea, but thinking a bit more and reading people's feedback, I'm growing less sure whether this is a good direction to take. There seems such a huge possibility that the content created in the Teams section won't be of consistently high quality, and that it will mainly be a huge Quora-like distraction from the core mission; the number of teams that will be able to discuss dev internal stuff, or even expose their employees, in the Teams section may be more limited than we expect; and there is so much left to do on SO proper... but I suppose we shall see
– PekkaOct 7 '15 at 12:10

2

Maybe only allowing migration to a team page you are part of might be a solution.
– LisaMMOct 7 '15 at 12:12

3

Quora may be a useful contrast here, @Pekka: they took Q&A & made it social; can we take networking and make it open? Remember, SO had a lot of classic problems to work out at first too...
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 13:51

Are customer support questions in scope? I thought the focus was on how a company creates its product.
– Gordon GustafsonOct 7 '15 at 15:48

3

This is all undefined right now, @Gordon. I think support questions would be a good use for it, because that's what I've seen folks trying to use SO for... But it's really up to you; if you wanna help shape what this becomes, sign up for the beta and mold it to your will...
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 15:50

4

Agreed that Product Support is what teams should be used for. The current proposed content, questions about "The Team (Overview, Meta Information), a member roster, projects, community interaction (Questions), and recruitment (Jobs, Get Involved)." is rather lacking in content. But a lot of teams/companies do point their users to SO for support (where the users ask frowned upon questions and get downvoted into oblivion.) Teams seems like a perfect place for companies to be able to direct their users to
– JKillianOct 7 '15 at 17:58

2

"can we take networking and make it open?" You can't, since what you have is a Q&A site. It's decidedly not about networking. You can switch its focus to networking, but then it moves away from Q&A and you lose what makes SO successful.
– sthOct 14 '15 at 20:53

I would have upvoted, but this post seems too resigned to this appealingly bad idea.
– Joshua DrakeOct 16 '15 at 19:12

This sounds like a recipe for worse fragmentation than with Documentation (aka Null Reference), at least as far as the question feature is concerned.

It might be a fair assumption that team members will be active and motivated enough to move actual programming questions onto the main site, but if it's not then we are in big trouble. New users will almost certainly think "I have a problem with Excel, I'll post to the Excel team's page!" instead of "This is a programming question, just tag it with Excel." Without very active cleanup, questions/answers will become much harder to find.

Without providing very easy and reliable ways of making sure programming questions stay where they belong, I don't see this feature ending very well.

The whole "ask a team a question" thing just feels very social and not very technical anyway. How are we going to deal with the inevitable "What do you think about this?" type questions? Are discussions more permitted (as on Meta)?

Adding to this problem are the "teams of one". Let's say someone like Jon Skeet (important part, well known) decides he wants to answer questions off on his own area (not that Jon Skeet would ever do such a thing) and creates a "solo" team. Questions asked to this person (which is really what it is at this point) aren't going to be community moderated or visible, and if they like answering the programming questions that come their way, the community loses.

I'm not saying these problems cannot be overcome, but suffice it to say I'm skeptical.

This wast the first thing I thought of as well. Perhaps there ought to be a way for high-rep users (say, 20k+?) to relocate Team questions back to Q&A?
– Ben CollinsOct 6 '15 at 20:27

6

I'm not saying you don't have a point (or that the Teams team hasn't already thought about how to tackle this), but here's something to consider: the big "ask question" button at the top of every page in the main site navigation will still be the way most people ask questions and will still go to the main Q&A section of the site. In order to ask a question on a team page, a user will actually have to to more work: navigate to the Teams section, then to a specific team, then to the questions section for that team.
– LauraOct 6 '15 at 20:28

48

@Laura I can imagine "beginner team" pages popping up, so that new users can ask questions without fearing downvotes. Despite the extra work, if it benefits them I can imagine them doing it, and they will ineveitably get answers. Which sounds similar to the "Don't make Programmers SO's toilet" event.
– davidismOct 6 '15 at 20:28

5

@Laura I'm fairly sure a lot of users will take it upon themselves to do that work, especially if their question gets shot down on the main site initially. It really is something to bear in mind
– PekkaOct 6 '15 at 20:29

1

@BenCollins The person receiving the question on the team side will be able to do that - they are the better experts for what is/isn't on-topic vs. for the team as it comes in.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:32

1

Yeah, @davidism has a point. What does moderation for this look like? Could questions go directly to a moderation queue specific to that team rather than appearing immediately? That may discourage some of the users who might just want to avoid the rep/privileges boundaries.
– Ben CollinsOct 6 '15 at 20:32

4

@NickCraver What I'm predicting is that people will create teams with the express idea to ignore any idea of "on topic". In other words, how are the teams moderated, not the posts?
– davidismOct 6 '15 at 20:34

1

I think the problem @davidism is even bigger than the one I wrote about. Presumably moderators could find and shut these down, but its even more cause for concern.
– BradleyDotNETOct 6 '15 at 20:37

1

@Laura For users frustrated with the existing experience (or even those who just think that going directly to the "experts" is the best path) I have little doubt they will do so, unless we hide the feature like we do chat
– BradleyDotNETOct 6 '15 at 20:38

1

What @davidism mentions is a real danger, but it could be relatively easily policed by mods. Taking a team page down after receiving a flag is easy, as easy as taking down a wildly off topic chat room, and little harm would be done if such a place lived for a while before being discovered.
– PekkaOct 6 '15 at 20:39

3

@Pekka웃 Agreed, but who will be raising such flags? I can easily imagine the number of Teams could grow such that just perusing the list for honeypots would become non-trivial.
– BradleyDotNETOct 6 '15 at 20:46

5

@WillCole yes, I understand what you want the feature to be, and I'm sure it will be that way in the private beta. What I'm asking is how we moderate the teams once anyone can use it.
– davidismOct 6 '15 at 21:48

1

@TallJeff: It is a fixable problem, but davidson is right to be concerned. It's also worth asking -- the rate might be (theoretically) lower, but this would still be adding a whole new burden to a moderation system that's already struggling slightly under scale. The difficulties in making the review system do anything meaningful or helpful to the diamond mods shows that this is in no way a trivial problem. Between this, Documentation, and SO itself, isn't that a bit much to ask of the diamond mods?
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 18:43

4

This is my biggest confusion as well. Where do you draw the line between this is a question for SO that involves product X and this is a question for product X's team?
– Chris PrattOct 7 '15 at 19:21

4

This is an attempt by Stack Exchange to make some money off of the great job they have been doing helping programmers. To be more specific, it's another iteration of Stack Overflow Carriers. Unfortunately, I think it's an ill-advized way to go about it. At best, it will be as moribund as Carriers. At worst, it will introduce more clutter, fragmentation and rancor into Stack Overflow world.
– user3458Oct 8 '15 at 14:06

Wait, does this mean Stack Overflow a social network? Emphatically no.

Hm... a lot of the future plans sound very much like a social network to me:

"Teams are an extension of your profile..."

"Team Artifacts" (yet another place to click "share now"?)

"Following Teams"

"Team Timeline"

Even the sign-up options have that "viral! join the herd now!" aspect:

"When adding roles, schools, or projects onto your profile, you will be asked if you would like to join the team at that time."

"When linking a Github or open source project to your profile, you’ll be asked to create or join a team page at that time."

The only thing you explicitly rule out is sending a private message; if Twitter removed Direct Messages tomorrow, would it cease to be a Social Network?

Sure, it will be a Stack Overflow flavoured social network, but it feels a lot more like a replacement for an organisation's Facebook or Google+ page than it does a community resource.

To be constructive, I think the key problem is giving the functionality a technical focus - less of the "why we're so great and you should come to us not those other schmucks", and more of the "here's the widget we use to floob our blombles". But quite what blombles need floobing that other sites don't already offer widgets for, I'm not sure...

To address your specific points up top: is your resume considered social? Teams are meant to be about things you make or do, along the same lines. Team Artifacts would literally be things you build - I'm not sure how "share now" is yielded from that, but let us know and we'll clarify. Following teams, at this point, only has if they have opening later - we're working on this but they're definitely not social features of any sort. The timeline would be activity on Stack Overflow.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:58

27

This. @NickCraver When I read the title of this post my first thought was "Oh no, we are going into social network hell" and then I read it, and it still sounds like a social network (albeit with a technical focus). One of the most powerful things about SO is that we are all here crowdsourcing information. This just seems like a massive distraction whose sole function is to take that crowd and segment it into their own little worlds (but thats just my opinion of course :) )
– BradleyDotNETOct 6 '15 at 21:02

18

@NickCraver Maybe the wording of the summary is way off then, because this just sounds like what you'd post to Facebook/Google+/Pinterest/whatever to me: "Blog articles, conference talks, podcast episodes. All the various things that features your team but that’s strewn across the worldwide interwebs." Nobody is going to post critiques of themselves, they're going to use this as a shop window - Post Here, Follow This, Catch Up Here.
– IMSoPOct 6 '15 at 21:02

11

As for a resume being social, go ask LinkedIn...
– IMSoPOct 6 '15 at 21:04

@IMSoP valid points on the reading. As for LinkedIn - the resume piece isn't social. They bolted on many things (that aren't a resume) to make something social. FWIW, I don't have a LinkedIn account, because of what they turned into.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 21:12

4

@NickCraver Without the "things bolted on", maybe a resume isn't social; but it's not a very interesting premise for a website, either, because I can host it on my own website, or a million existing sites which have the "things bolted on" which I want to use. What, then, is the motivation for people to post information to their Team page, if it's not for people to interact with it, socially?
– IMSoPOct 6 '15 at 21:21

@Nick I don't have a LinkedIn account, because of what they turned into good man.
– PekkaOct 7 '15 at 7:14

2

Team pages are for people to interact - but it'd be firmly on programming and related topics. You wouldn't be able to post cat pictures, photograph your breakfast, or hit on that cute guy/girl. they're going to use this as a shop window sure, and that's fine as long as it's open, free - and programming related.
– PekkaOct 7 '15 at 7:16

22

@Pekka웃 OK, so it's a specialised social network firmly focussed on programming and related topics, just as LinkedIn is a social network focussed on professional networking, and Instagram is a social network focussed on photos. I don't think that's automatically a Bad Thing, but let's call a spade a spade. It's both more and less than a Q&A site; it's (presumably) not a Project Management tool; it's a site where individuals outside of a Team can connect, in a variety of formats, with individuals inside a Team - it's social networking, Stack Overflow style!
– IMSoPOct 7 '15 at 13:40

2

Waiting to hear back on @IMSoP response..that was very valid...cricket cricket...
– JonHOct 7 '15 at 18:35

8

@Pekka웃 Also, "You wouldn't be able to post cat pictures, photograph your breakfast" - who is going to stop you? What motivation will the community have to mark Stack Overflow's latest unicorn video as Off Topic from their own Team page? Or if the community does get strict, what motivation will there be for Teams to learn the rules, rather than just using a different service to provide their shop window?
– IMSoPOct 7 '15 at 20:08

1

Plus the idea davidism mentioned on another answer. What about teams with just one single member? Why is this not 'interacting with a single person' and therefore smells like the 'social reference' where the whole topic is 'emphatically' against?
– bullyOct 9 '15 at 11:24

@bully well, I was actually thinking of "teams" that weren't real, just a place to post questions that couldn't get downvoted. I wasn't referring to how many people would "belong" to that team or whether it was social. But I could see it going that way too.
– davidismOct 9 '15 at 15:29

Disclaimer: I'm 15, I don't have a job, and I still do homework. So, what services of Stack Overflow are available to me? Just the site. And maybe Meta. SO Careers is basically useless for me, since I'm not looking for a job, and I don't care. I'm putting this out in the open just in case it affects my answer.

I've got a little Open Source company of my own. It's called Arctic Lights. I haven't really put anything up yet, since I'm still developing it, but right now, my main focus is on the creation of an API (called Tundra) and sort of booklet to assist people who are learning to program.

So here I have, my own little company called Arctic Lights. I create a "team" for use on this page. What do I do?

From these "example" questions on the picture, what kind of questions am I to expect? I can only expect questions, that would just be things that would be listed in my repository wiki. Things such as:

How do I contribute?

Why do you host this on GitHub? Why not BitBucket?

FOOLS! YOU GUYS DECLINED MY PULL REQUEST??? HOW DARE YOU?

There is something about all this: these are all common questions that are likely to be asked on a project, or even organization's website. I already have a platform for this: Github has things like GitHub Pages, and I can even run websites for free on places like Wix.

So how is this useful for me? I don't know. It doesn't seem useful for me at all. It simply duplicates what I've got, my policies and questions, and it just wastes my time: another thing to see which I've answered before.

In my eyes, this is a way to create a customer support platform for companies. I'm not sure how that would even fit in: most companies have their own platforms anyway. These questions won't be useful to anyone but those involved in companies. Questions would simply arise from the mere curiosity of people themselves.

It's quite likely that I don't understand what's happening here, and don't fully get the benefits and implications that this would bring. In essence, it feels like it solves a problem — product support — but creates more at the same time.

I keep thinking about this more and more, and have thought of more potential issues:

Docs were great. They solved a recurrent problem: the lack of documentation. What problem does this solve?

I committed to this proposal some time ago, hoping that this might become a site for researchers or knowledgeable academics asking serious technical questions about artificial intelligence here. It seems I was dearly mistaken ... Most of the questions are those asked by the merely curious.

The "Things such as..." list is missing some potentially useful questions (which I believe were highlighted in the original post as well). Like "I see you mix $library1 and $library2 to complete $task, can you explain why not just use one since they both do the same $list of things?" or "Can you share your experience with $new_and_shiny_app as early adopters?" etc.
– user3459110Oct 9 '15 at 12:46

"n my eyes, this is a way to create a customer support platform for companies. I'm not sure how that would even fit in: most companies have there own platforms anyway. These questions won't be useful to anyone but those involved in companies. Questions would simply arise from the mere curiosity of people themselves." A lot of companies that cater to developers push them to post on SO - this could be a great developer community tool for companies.
– PrescottOct 9 '15 at 20:43

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Forget all the other fluff in the post - I'm onboard a centralized place for a company to help answer developers questions around developers consuming their api's / products. THAT would make my life easier as an engineer.
– PrescottOct 9 '15 at 20:46

1

I am over twice your age, but I also have a very small open-source startup. The difference between SO(I think) and GitHub wiki would be at least twofold: 1: question driven documentation, which puts the emphasis on the yagni aspect of documentation, and 2) Gamefied up/down voting for moderation for convenience. These two aspects I think combined with the traffic SO has gotten over the years (bc of their quality of implementation) is the reason why SO is the best source for online programming questions. Thats how I see it anyway.
– user4275029Oct 10 '15 at 1:44

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@Zizouz212 That's pretty good for a 15yo person, you'll be a millionaire before you are 23
– tobiak777Oct 10 '15 at 8:27

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@red2nb If you like ziz's style, come on over to opensource.stackexchange.com where Ziz is one of our mods. :) End of blatant advertising
– kdopenOct 13 '15 at 0:18

@AwalGarg But again, you're proving my second issue: that these questions will be asked by the merely curious. Those sorts of questions aren't going to be solving specific problems that affect people. To be honest, I don't see the questions that you mention as being useful.
– Zizouz212Oct 13 '15 at 1:38

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Awesome post for a 15 year old. Can I be on your team?
– Shawn MehanOct 15 '15 at 0:57

@Prescott I agree with your second comment. I see a lot of small-medium communities/companies/"teams" using SO for product support. Currently, they just use tags. Any questions related to that comm/comp/team could only be found through a brittle search. This would give them a stronger platform to host questions about using their product.
– LazerSharksOct 16 '15 at 5:49

@Zizouz212 well those "merely curious" people are quite a lot in number. If Stack Overflow wants to cater to them, I don't see the harm ;)
– user3459110Oct 18 '15 at 11:20

I'm probably biased as one of the top users and a moderator on The Workplace. We handle questions about this ALL THE TIME. Some of my thoughts...

It helps you hire and recruit other developers.

After salary, two of the top job search considerations for developers are team culture and what they’re building. But, despite that, job listings are typically dry and boring lists of requirements, responsibilities, and expectations. A short team blurb might be included, but it may not even represent the development team fully. Teams can cut through that by giving developers a fuller picture of the team, created by the team.

Inversely, if you’re looking for a job, now you have one place you can go to learn about a team, their culture, what they’re building, and who’s involved. Maybe this information is the motivation you needed to apply or maybe it helps you feel more secure in your possible decision to join the team. Or, maybe it’s the info you need to realize just how miserable you’d be working with that team. Either way, Teams can help you make more informed decisions.

If I'm looking for a company, I'm not going to really believe a bunch of marketing material content posted online in what will basically be marketing.

I'm going to believe things said by those companies users.

OK, great, so a team is composed of real people. Is this valuable still?

How many companies are going to actively allow their employees to post, ah, less than positive content about them? Let alone inside business information? This is some of the main stuff that matters - the problem areas. A non-anonymous thing is going to make it really, really hard to get specific feedback. Even if it is entirely anonymous I'm still not convinced it'd be successful.

And on the flipside, would employees want to contribute meaningful content? Many companies have really strict social media standards. We on The Workplace get all sorts of questions about people who make single tweets, Facebook posts, etc. and run into problems.

All this might not be the case in startup cultures, where I suspect general tolerance for sharing practices/social media content is much more accepted. But many people don't work in those company cultures.

However I still think this is a great idea. The focus on the career/workplace related aspect? Meh.

But the ability to basically have mini-Stack Overflow sites means that the Area 51 process can now be bypassed for one-off projects. If I and a few other people create an application, we can have our customer support basically work as part of Stack Overflow. This is great.

I see a lot of potential for this to be quite useful for these sorts of purposes.

Agreed on the company part. I would really like to create and help manage a team for the company I currently work for. It would probably help their exposure and make them possibly more attractive to work for. But at this point, I can already see that this will probably require a lot organization and management interaction. The company already has a very flexible culture, but that doesn’t mean that everybody can just do and write what they want. I can totally see this work for public and open companies like Stack Overflow; but for other companies, e.g. those that work in B2B? Not really.
– pokeOct 7 '15 at 7:05

3

I agree regarding the business inside information. If we're doing something really cool, then we're not going to want to talk about it publicly because (a) it might not be "ready" for public view -- a crappy demonstration of a great product can kill it (b) other smart teams may pick up on what we're doing and beat us to it.
– JesuismeOct 7 '15 at 14:10

19

I think the problem this solves is 'We created a great useful, website. How can we monetize it?'
– jwgOct 8 '15 at 8:40

If the team feels it’s a question that should be on Stack Overflow, they can move that question out into the general questions area.

How will this work with questions that are clearly out of Stack Overflow's scope? Will there be other "migration paths" (for want of a better term) to Server Fault, Programmers or The Workplace? Will we be able to reject these migrations if we feel that the question is still too opinion based/broad/what ever?

I'm concerned because none of your example questions that you expect to be asked in the Teams area are remotely on topic for Stack Overflow or indeed any of the sites I've mentioned.

We haven't thought about migration paths - that's a good point to consider. For team questions they don't need to be in scope on SO, just for the team. If a question is neither and trash...we have a nice round bin in the corner it'll likely end up in. To be clear: team questions will not appear in Stack Overflow proper. Only if they are on-topic and a team member says so when they are received and answered are they converted into normal Stack Overflow questions.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:50

@NickCraver - I understood that bit ;) It was just that all the example questions would be definitely off topic on SO, and probably off topic elsewhere too.
– ChrisF♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:52

9

I like the idea of being able to send team questions to other sites. I'd like it a lot more if you had to have a "team presence" of some sort on the destination site in order to send it there... Imagine Google's cloud team on both SO and SF, answering support questions internally and sending those that were suited to the appropriate site to be answered.
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 22:07

@Shog9 - Has anyone even reached out to determine if that imagination is actually a possibility? I feel like there would be more support for this feature if there was more support from actual teams. At the moment it kind of feels like "Field of Dreams".
– Travis JOct 8 '15 at 19:53

How is the community going to monitor, and vote on, incoming team questions? Crowdsourced moderation is why SO is what it is, after all. The community will kill spam within a minute or two, low quality stuff gets downvoted quickly.

How will you achieve that for team questions? How will you prevent, for example, badly maintained team pages from becoming ghost towns with low quality questions and outright spam?

You can't count entirely on team page members to keep the place clean, and you can't exactly show team questions on SO's front page.

Will moderators do the rest of the cleanup? Can they? If not, who else can - the community through a review queue? Would that work?

Or is all this overestimating the amount of content that would be coming in?

We were mostly concerned with not distracting from core Q&A with new team Q&A. If we need more visibility into the team questions it should be pretty straightforward to provide lists of all team questions.
– David FullertonOct 6 '15 at 20:43

2

We've also thought about exposing team questions on the /teams view, and a review queue for them if flagged, etc. All of the current moderation routes are currently on the table - and we certainly don't want to overload moderators.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:47

2

You could provide lists of team questions, but would anyone want to go through them on a regular basis? Hardly. It's different from browsing questions in tags you know that you might want to answer. It would probably boil down to some form of moderation queue. (Just playing devil's advocate here - I don't think in the slightest that this will kill the idea, it's just a big snag)
– PekkaOct 6 '15 at 20:55

I think if the questions are targeted at a group of people, it is up to those people whether the question should be closed or not (to some degree)
– user4639281Oct 6 '15 at 21:17

@TinyGiant Along the lines of your thought, it's quite possible the team should have much more autonomy over team questions. For example, maybe team questions would end up only appearing to the poster and the team members until the question is answered by the team. The team can close them, etc.
– Tall JeffOct 6 '15 at 21:40

2

@TallJeff The only thing with that is that a team can then just close any questions they don't want to answer and there wouldn't be any record of the question being asked. Whether that is a problem or not.... we'll see I guess.
– user4639281Oct 6 '15 at 21:44

2

@Pekka웃 Team pages are more than just questions though. The fact that you can ask a team a question means they put in a certain amount of effort to create the page in the first place. There will be other content there as well. If pages start becoming ghost towns, then we can address that then. That becomes our problem of finding ways to engage people more. That's not a community mod problem.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 14:07

Is Stack Overflow expanding too fast? Stack Overflow introduces Documentation and Teams in a short time frame. We don't even know how Documentation will be received nor whether the concept holds.

From millions of visitors, how many users are really active? Can they be active on Stack Overflow, Meta Stack Overflow, Documentation and Teams at the same time? Especially in the beginning I expect Documentation to require much work. On the other hand side, the new concepts might motivate new users to become more active.

Personally, I would have delayed Teams until Documentation had reached a "stable" state with decent content and decreasing demand on new topics.

See, this is the sort of question you could've asked on Stack Overflow's team page if that existed...
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 22:21

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(of course, the answer is "no one knows. We can either sit on our hands, or try stuff & hope for the best - and my fingers are already sore.")
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 22:22

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Any number of people will do any amount of work for imaginary Internet points. We already know this.
– Peter MortensenOct 6 '15 at 23:11

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We don't even know if how Documents will be received... true, but does it matter? They are different, unrelated concepts.
– GolezTrolOct 7 '15 at 8:08

2

"this is the sort of question you could've asked on Stack Overflow's team page" "of course, the answer is \"no one knows\....". IIUC, questions to which the answer is obviously of the form "no one knows" or "<insert ambiguous answer here>" are not welcome to the Stack Exchange QA model. Is the aim to now allow such questions, @Shog9?
– user3459110Oct 7 '15 at 13:23

@AwalGarg I imagine the answer would be expanded beyond "no one knows."… at least for us it would be.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:30

Documentation has a long(er) road ahead of it. Teams is something we feel fairly confident about and we think we could get into Stack Overflow much quicker. Also while we have tens of millions of visitors, we don't have that many people involved. We think there's definitely more room for people to get more involved.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:34

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The aim is to allow folks to answer them in a context where they won't be noisy, @awal... Or not answer at all, if the question is not useful. If you emailed us that question right now, we'd answer it privately and no one else would ever benefit from knowing we'd even thought about it - what a loss!
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 14:12

1

i think the answer is right on topic in meta. My take of the answer is that the new feature is distracting without clear advantage.
– tinlyxOct 17 '15 at 5:01

And even if they aren't every question, I think that covers the vast majority. What team is going to want to spend 95% of their time deleting, migrating, downvoting and otherwise dealing with Off-Topic questions?

@Zak — you could be right. Maybe team questions doesn't work and what happens is what you laid out; but maybe you're wrong as well. Even if I grant you Google won't answer these questions, I know Stack Overflow would. And again—maybe we're unique here—but we don't think we are. For every Google out there, you have a number of smaller teams who might be more than willing to share the general parameters at least and specifics at best.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 12:50

3

I disagree, @Zak - team q&a is what makes this interesting! Anyone can set up a vanity page for their team with minimal effort today; heck, they can link to it from their SO profile if they wish. Integrating that offers some minor convenience, but its hardly compelling - but q&a is hard to do well, as many have found to their dismay. If we can help with that, we'll be offering folks something with real value - yes, there'll be challenges, but they'll be worth the work it takes to overcome them.
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 14:09

3

@Shog9, Hynes: But how does this actually help any developers beyond some idle curiosity? Even if (somehow) this is actually valuable to the initial poster, this seems very far from the goal of making the internet a better place. Great that you'd make Q&A for teams easier, whatever that means, but I'm still not seeing the value in that.
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 20:52

Folks seem to be fixated on the "AMA" stuff, but I see that as a sideshow. Look at what folks ask us: questions about using the product, fixing their accounts, etc. - you know, stuff they actually need to know. And then, once in a great while, some AMA-style fluff. The meat & potatoes are boring, but they're very important...
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 20:56

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@Shog9: But why should SO provide a platform for other companies to do, in essence, customer support?
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 21:09

Because folks have been asking for it since... Forever? Because folks try to do it anyway, and it causes unnecessary stress and work for folks on Stack Overflow? Because we believe that devs communicating with their users is a good thing and should be encouraged?
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 21:15

@Shog9: I'm skeptical that this will actually reduce the workload for moderation on Stack Overflow, but at least that's better justification than anything given in the original post.
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 22:24

My creed is basically, "this could yet be a complete disaster"... But that's no reason not to try new things!
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 23:32

I'm thinking of my own use case, of course: Working at a Startup that tries to build software in the open and indeed, our reason for existing is to introduce others to programming and technology; so even if I can't find an immediate use for Teams, it feels like it should fit.

But what would I use it for? It seems like it could end up being a "Quora For Development Teams", but Stack Overflow's strength has always been the conveying of technical information. So while it's cool that we have the option to talk about the technical considerations teams take on, I fear it'll turn into Why didn't Twitter's Performance problems doom it early on?

I like the substance; but really don't want the rubber-necking and navel-gazing that permeates the internet.

Stack Overflow has always shy'd away from Bikeshedding, and I'm afraid that "Teams" will focus on just that.

This article certainly seems to be missing a problem statement - it gives the impression (which I'm sure is wrong!) of a conversation in the SO office along the lines of "We should build something for teams!" "Like what?" "I don't know, let's build a beta of some stuff and see what happens"
– IMSoPOct 6 '15 at 21:14

@Jin I got the impression that Stack Overflow started with a perceived need / gap in the market, not with Joel and Jeff brainstorming interesting projects they could set up. They didn't know exactly what it was going to look like, but they had some idea of what they wanted to achieve. The way this has been pitched seems to be lacking that focus - it's like someone wrote the heading "Stack Overflow Teams" on the whiteboard and everyone brainstormed from there. Again, I'm guessing this is just the way it's been communicated, and internally there's a lot more idea of what the aims are and aren't.
– IMSoPOct 7 '15 at 15:22

4

@IMSoP, precisely, original SO was iterating towards solving a real problem. This is just an idea iterating to discover what problems it might solve.
– BenjolOct 8 '15 at 4:54

I'm dubious whether "it has to be about the team" isn't too broad a requirement for incoming questions (as much as "has to be on topic for SO" is too narrow.)

What about the inevitable "How much money do you make, John Carmack?", "What is the status of the Oculus Rift and why did you sell out, Palmer Luckey?", "Can you fix this code for me, Nick Craver" et al.?

The last example is going to be easy to squelch, but where do you draw the line on legitimate questions for teams that have nothing, or very little, to do with programming at all? Are questions about programmer chairs and tables (and programming on a boat) on topic? What would be the rules governing this?

And even when there is a set of rules - different teams will have differing ideas of what is on-topic for them and what they are willing to respond to. Who gets the final say on this? SO/the community/moderators, or the teams themselves? If it's not the teams themselves, is this not going to create strife?

But perhaps that's something that will sort itself out during the Beta.

Internally, we haven't fully figured out the Q&A portion of the team page. A hypothesis I have currently is that it might be good if teams can toggle the Q&A mode: off, on, on but team asked (the questions are asked and answered by team members in a FAQ-like manner). That's my conclusion upon reading some of the initial reactions here. Thoughts?
– Haney♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:43

2

Yes, we'll definitely have to work out what kind of Q&A is allowed. It won't be a section to ask anything at all -- it should still be focused on sharing interesting knowledge, not just pestering people.
– David FullertonOct 6 '15 at 20:45

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@Haney that would give the team some control, sounds good. Would also probably help prevent some of the ghost towns resulting from questions amassing on an inactive team page.
– PekkaOct 6 '15 at 20:45

9

To add to @Haney, we might also disable Q&A automatically if a team hasn't answered in some time period - that would prevent it being used as a spam box/ghost town, etc. We'll watch feedback here for a while and see what other ideas are proposed as well - we're not dead set on any approach.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:46

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That sounds pretty effective for protecting the teams. Another thing though, what happens if a team's ideas about what is on topic differ from the community's? Suppose a game dev team allows wildly off topic questions on how they 3D scanned their characters from actors and what problems they ran into, and members of the community vote to close them based on whatever set of rules is in force by then. The team gets angry because their interactions are shut down. What happens, and who decides?
– PekkaOct 6 '15 at 20:47

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@Pekka웃 those kinds of things are exactly what the beta will hopefully shake out. I don't know the answer, but I am confident that we'll figure it out.
– Haney♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:53

5

I often wondered about using a GeekDesk on a boat... how is this not StackOverflow turning into a discussion forum? Don't we already have chatrooms for this sort of thing?
– Chris OOct 6 '15 at 22:55

The title of this question made me think of "expert teams", so users who group themselves under a tag, for better coordination. Like a group of asp.net-mvc experts, who know of good canonical questions in their tags, who can cleanup commonly asked questions by closing them as duplicates and who can work together find and answer the harder, more interesting questions. Or maybe they can guide users in asking good questions in their tags.

But no.

I'm sorry, but all examples in the OP are too localized. It's very nice that company X spent Y amount of money on Z servers, but that does in no way guarantee that the same approach will work for a random user's question that more or less touches the same subject.

I can see this becoming a "blog post request" feature, where a user "lazily" asks a company "How do you do X?", where that company now is going to spend time and effort to answer that very specific, localized question that may or may not help others.

To make this more constructive than a rant:

For whom are these questions supposed to be interesting?

For whom are these answers supposed to be interesting?

How are "personal advice requests" going to be prevented, if you want that?

Exactly what kind of questions and answers are you looking for? Do you have examples?

@Hynes I would love to, but I'm currently not in a team, nor do I have contact with other SO members. I wouldn't know how to coordinate the forming of a team. :)
– CodeCasterOct 7 '15 at 14:47

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Arranging teams of experts around one particular SO tag actually sounds like a much better idea! To improve FAQs and canonical duplicates, to make sure the Wiki is relevant and correct etc. Perhaps for each major tag, enable an "expert" tag which you will only be able to add to your questions once you reach a certain reputation in the "base" tag (for example silver badge). This might motivate the technical experts to stay on SO and not abandon the site - unless people haven't noticed the experts are currently fleeing from SO because of the crap flood.
– LundinOct 8 '15 at 6:56

@Lundin except we already do this with Chat, for example the Python room regularly discusses canonical questions, works to clean up the tag, and is a place to ask more general questions.
– davidismOct 9 '15 at 15:31

I was thinking the same thing as you and was very excited about the idea of being able to create my C# Gang of 4 Team, having its own reputation points. For me this would have been a killer. I'm the kind of SO user who don't care about its reputation points, but I'd care much more for my points, and find them more legitimate if they were at an expert team level. I think if they had been faithful to their brand, it is the direction they would have taken. Today they are trying to change their brand and create a social network to make more profits.
– tobiak777Oct 10 '15 at 8:35

@davidism Far from every programming language got active chats on SO, and then there's also the tags that are used even less frequently.
– LundinOct 12 '15 at 6:13

1

@Lundin so if users of those languages can't organize around a chat room, what makes you think they'll organize around a team page any better?
– davidismOct 12 '15 at 6:23

@davidism A chat requires that you are constantly available, and it is a pretty bad medium for anything formal. There's no logs and if they are, they are filled with "noise". And there's actually no guarantees that the people present in the chat have the necessary knowledge or rep to make such changes to the site. But indeed, I don't think many SO users will organize around a team page, no matter the purpose.
– LundinOct 12 '15 at 6:39

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@Lundin You seem to have literally no idea how SO chats work. They are completely asynchronous and have a permanent public log. So no, there’s no need at all to be constantly available. And if you get people together to discuss a certain topic, you can also easily avoid noise. The rest of your comment also applies to theoretical teams.
– pokeOct 12 '15 at 6:44

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@poke I do know how they work, do you? If 10+ people are chatting away in it about random topics, good luck tracking anything meaningful in the log through all those noise comments.
– LundinOct 12 '15 at 6:50

@Lundin not sure what else I can say on this that I and poke haven't already. My experience in the Python room over the last two years is nothing like what you describe. It's perfectly possible to maintain order.
– davidismOct 12 '15 at 16:42

I know Facebook.SO poisoned the well here (and for a whole bunch of related ideas), but please do consider that the problem there may have been primarily... Facebook. If we'd offered that feature to Mozilla or something, we might all have a rather different view on the subject now - not that we should ignore the potential problem, but neither should we ignore the potential advantages when it comes to groups that do care about developers.
– Shog9Oct 8 '15 at 15:17

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@Shog9, the big problem to me is around official/non-official representation of the company. If it were clearly one or the other, that would at least be easier to reason about. Fuzzy is where the problems happen, and I think that it's this that you/we should be concentrating on, not the technical wow factor.
– BenjolOct 9 '15 at 4:42

As others, I have difficulties trying to think of actual use cases for this that makes such a project worthwhile. I can think of only two:

Open source project teams that answer questions about e.g. design decisions or implementation details that help understanding the project.

Open companies that use this to show off their projects and teams and as such increase their exposure for hiring purposes.

The first use case is actually a pretty good one; I can see this being the real value for the community. If open source project teams would participate, users could use this to really dig into the codebase, to understand what the developers were thinking. Think about the jQuery team joining, making it possible to ask questions like “why does function X take the arguments in order Y instead of the more sensible Z?”, “why did you decide to combine multiple functionalities into a single function X when you could have split it up for a clearer API?”, or *“why do you have code X in function Y, is this required for browser Z?”.

These are questions that would really encourage engagement and would help understanding those teams, eventually even allowing those teams to get other people on board after they understood their thinking process. Granted, a lot teams already have other platforms for this, e.g. GitHub issues (although those have a certain threshold of being issues so implementation questions are not really encouraged there), or public chat rooms (e.g. Slack). But having a platform which many developers already participate on is probably a good motivation to move things there. After all, you can also use this to get input on your team’s decisions and maybe iterate on it and improve it later (we all always learn).

It will be an issue however, if users end up asking support questions. I can imagine that having a jQuery team (to continue that example) will attract inexperienced users to ask questions there. After all, what’s more promising than asking the library developers directly about your beginner’s problem? Of course, this may be appropriate for very small team projects where the developers don’t think it’s good enough to ask on SO directly (although that really shouldn’t be the case), but for large projects that already have a large userbase and lots of participation on SO, I can certainly see this becoming a problem. So moderation is a very big point that needs to be solved. Otherwise, I can see a constant influx of annoying questions drive away teams.

As for the second use case, this is definitely attractive to companies wanting to show off; but it mostly works for open companies only. Stack Overflow is the prime example here: They serve a super large platform with an incredible amount of active users and content. Of course that makes the company very interesting to many developers, triggering questions about the architecture (“how do you manage to do X?”, “Why did you decide to build your own Y for this?”, …). After all, building and hosting Stack Overflow absolutely isn’t a simple task. And even for non-technical questions this still works well since Stack Overflow is very open about their work culture. Their belief in working remote is remarkable and I can certainly see this or other topics start many interesting questions that are also interesting to users not interested in applying there.

But this does not work for many other companies. Of course, we have some where I can totally see this; e.g. companies like Slack or Facebook using this as a platform to advertise themselves as possible employers. But most companies don’t work like that; most companies cannot go public about things for many reasons. Those reasons can include corporate governance or even just NDAs about customer projects. Of course, if you ask employees, they often want to be able to talk about things, but more often than not, they simply can’t. So for a company to participate in such a platform, there would be a lot going on in the background to make it work even remotely. And in the end, there will probably only a few people left in the position allowed to answer a certain kind of questions in some special way. And that makes it immediately less attractive.

So apart from the use cases, of which one is only very limited, I don’t really see what this platform is going to solve. What is it supposed to do for teams that don’t work like Stack Overflow?

While teams might not be able to talk about specifics, maybe they could still share broad lessons and insights—which is more than what's probably out there now. To your point though about how most companies don't work like this, maybe not. But more and more are opening up about things like team culture, projects, and members. These are the things other developers care about—especially if you are considering joining that team. And companies are starting to (slowly) recognize this.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:09

2

What’s the incentive though for companies to share these broad lessons and insights? What do they get for investing time? And it’s very often not up to the companies to decide this. This is different for companies that create a product they can highlight (e.g. Stack Overflow). For example, the company I work for works for other companies. We simply are not in a position where we can decide whether we can talk about most of our projects publicly.
– pokeOct 7 '15 at 13:19

1

Could you talk about how your company runs projects for other companies or why your company suggest certain solutions over other ones to your clients? The incentive for companies—specifically—is recruiting. Developers are highly sought after (and I mean highly). There aren't enough developers for companies. When there is a demand supply issue then, companies need to do more to attract and engage developers—being transparent about the team culture, members, and projects is one way to stand out (right now).
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:22

4

@Hynes: As I look through this whole page, one thing becomes clearer to me from the staff responses: that this is a misplaced Careers feature. Can you explain why SO needs or wants this as something separate, if it's main use is recruiting (already covered by Careers), and it doesn't really work for anything technical (reasons discussed by others like confidentiality, etc.)?
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 20:59

I can definitely see the benefit from the recruiting side. The posts throughout the thread that explain how SE (SO?) hopes this will be used to improve developer recruiting is a testament to what Stack Overflow has been about since the beginning - improving developers and making the internet a better place.

Could you define what you mean when you say "social network"? Because I think we have differing meanings here.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 15:39

3

It feels like the AMA portion of reddit. Anyone can go ask a question that would normally be off topic on SO and the idea is the team will provide an answer. It may be a vague answer (ie "It cost a lot"), or specific (ie. "We bought X servers for this purpose, Y servers for this purpose and intend to purchase Z more if we meet our goals in the next few months."). It seems social in the sense that questions like "What's it work work there?" are being considered as appropriate. The idea of following a team - which SO doesn't let you do - "Focus on the content on the person" - seems very social.
– Andy♦Oct 7 '15 at 15:43

There will still be off-topic questions and "too-broad" questions, even for team questions. We aren't welcoming vague answers either. As we move along we will have to implement methods to address this issue.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 16:42

12

@Hynes Broadness wasn't the point being raised, I don't think. It's about personalness - "What do you do with X?" is a fundamentally more "social" question than "What can be done with X?". As Andy says, the focus is no longer on the content, it's on the person, who will inevitably be using it to advertise themselves.
– IMSoPOct 7 '15 at 19:56

Perhaps they could be improved, but your example questions do not seem to necessitate anything other than a new Stack Exchange site based on practices applied by specific companies and organizations.

Additionally, this idea seems biased toward open projects that wouldn't mind sharing these metrics. I'm not sure I can say the same for companies like Oracle and Microsoft. I can say that the company that I work for would not allow this without getting some prior approval to share operating information, and even then, I'm not sure I would want to ask.

"How does [Company X] run PostgreSQL at an enterprise scale?",

"What's a typical budget for [Company Y] when they upgrade their data centers?", or

"How does [Company Z] keep their distributed team working together even though they’re spread across multiple time zones?"

I suggest instead you create a Stack Exchange site organized around sharing industry best practices that are not specifically related to code (where industry/company is a tag, not a team).

This would be a good place to share Q&A about processes and methodologies. For example, questions I am curious about in general:

Agile

How long are your sprints? Does it vary between projects?

What technique do you use for story pointing?

To what extent are your actual users involved in writing user stories?

Having a “one question, multiple companies answer” site rather than a bunch of “one question, one company answers” subsites definitely sounds like a better idea. Right now, it seems like this will only lead to a huge question fragmentation with no way to actually objectively compare answers.
– pokeOct 7 '15 at 7:08

The proposed new site would need a way to verify that answerers had the credentials to answer authoritatively. On the upside, if SE built such a system, they could then use it for themselves on every meta to allow all employees to make official posts when necessary without needing a diamond.
– Nathan TuggyOct 7 '15 at 7:15

1

If there are concerns already about getting enough traffic to these team areas (and questions) on Stack Overflow, I'm not sure how creating new SE sites will solve this. The fact is for the majority of our users: if it's not on Stack Overflow—it doesn't exist. And while maybe Oracle and Microsoft may not share, there are thousands of smaller companies and teams out there who would be.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:18

There’s a difference between hundreds of separate team areas (a separate question pool for each team) and a single site that has them all in one place though. And there’s no reason why such a single “combined teams site” couldn’t be integrated into SO just like the plan is now.
– pokeOct 7 '15 at 13:27

Maybe a 'verified content expert' status could be assigned to users after passing some manual verification step, whether it be for a company, the author of a tool, etc. But who to use as the 3rd party certification source? Those users would likely need to expose more public information than usual as part of being verified.
– nothingisnecessaryOct 7 '15 at 16:06

I've thought about this problem for a while and it's not so easy to get around the problem of companies not willing to share information about their operations. One possibility that I thought about was to allow anonymous responses. I understand this is a potential pandora's box, but as it stands, may be 10% of companies will allow their workers to share sensitive information, but many more would be willing to do so anonymously (probably closer to 90%). If there was a way to monitor anonymous responses, may be moderate them, or restrict their content in some way, it may work out very well.
– MordechaiOct 7 '15 at 19:23

5

@MorDeror: But isn't that a legal gray(ish) area when someone shares something that is under NDA? I can't imagine any company letting their team page stay up much longer after someone divulges a trade secret or information enabling a hack.
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 20:56

@lunixios - this can become a problem for some narrow scope problems. Let's say you're working on software to control fuel supply in a rocket engine, and there are only two companies out there that deal with it. Then, of course, sharing information would violate the NDA. But if you're implementing a web farm, and you don't disclose any identifying information. What's the harm in sharing how you set up the data caching layer?
– MordechaiOct 8 '15 at 6:34

@MorDeror: I'm not saying that there's necessarily harm -- but that doesn't mean that a company lets people share any of the information anyway.
– LinuxiosOct 8 '15 at 15:45

The idea of this sounds very interesting. From the sounds of it, it doesn't feel like it will fit the Stack Exchange Q&A model very well.

For starters (and correct me if I am wrong), giving each team their own Q&A page is almost like giving each team their own mini Stack Overflow site. Which comes with all the benefits and baggage of a Stack Exchange site. The questions can be focused, informative and can be a great source of knowledge for all of us. However, I feel like there are a lot of potential problems here.

Community size: One of the best parts of Stack Overflow is that if I ask a question, I am effectively asking a relatively large group of people that question. With such a large group, there is a at least fairly good chance I can find someone who has an answer. With Teams, I feel that since teams are going to be relatively small, the number of potential answerers is much smaller. And thus the chance of getting an answer is smaller. If getting an answer is conceivably harder, what is going to keep a community alive? Part of having a Stack Exchangesite go from being a proposal to a beta to a full fledged site (as I understand it), is being able to have enough activity and a large enough community to support that activity. Will small teams be able to handle that? Will large (and presumably very popular) teams be able to handle the tsunami of questions they get? I feel like some might hit the sweet spot between public interest and being able to answer questions and many won't.

Culture fragmentation: what might be a good, answerable question for, say, the Google team, might not be for the Git team. What one team might be willing to answer will almost certainly vary from team to team (or able to answer, thinking mostly due to lawyers here, but there could be other reasons). This would lead to each team page having its own little sub-culture of what is a good question there and what isn't.

Community moderation: Stack Overflow's community moderation works because it has reached a sort of "critical mass" where there are enough people active to be able to combat the flood of spam and poor questions. Will teams be able to achieve that "critical mass" of people to be able to moderate their own stuff? Will we just rely on everyone from all the teams to group moderate everything? How would that work if the previous point of team sub-cultures is a valid concern?

The Q&A model and voting: Part of how Stack Overflow tends to accumulate some really, really good answers stems from being able to vote on answers and how good they are. It can drive people to putting in a little more effort, to explain things better. It also allows more than one person to answer a question and have the best answers float to the top and the garbage sink to the bottom. With teams, I don't think there can be anything other than "the one true answer". Since the example questions seem to all ask about how teams do what they do, the only people that can really answer that are the team members. And there is no way for us to say "yes that answer is right" or "no it is wrong". It just kind of is what it is.

Answers aren't timeless: If I ask on Stack Overflow how to write an SQL query in SQL Server 2012 to do X, that will always work. It is also likely that I can take that knowledge into future versions of SQL Server and apply that code directly or at least the basic concepts. With teams, what is true today may not be true tomorrow. As teams learn from their failures or come up with new ideas, how they do things changes. Will answers be updated to reflect that? Or will we end up with a near innumerable number of "How does Team X do this as of Date Y?" questions? Or, looking at one of the example questions: "What's a typical budget for [Company Y] when they upgrade their data centers?". That kind of information is probably only good in a limited time frame and then quickly becomes obsolete.

I'm sure with enough thought I could come up with more concerns, but this is sufficient for now. Overall, I feel like this sort of thing is a better fit for a more traditional forum format than for the Stack Exchange model. I'm interested to see how this plays out, but I'm not very confident that it will be a rousing success.

"What's a typical budget for [Company Y] when they upgrade their data centers?", or

"How does [Company Z] keep their distributed team working together even though they’re spread across multiple time zones?"

Why does company X want to answer question 1, and if they do, why do they want to do it in this tiny backwater of StackOverflow, rather than on their corporate blog?

Who really wants to ask question 2, other than senior operations manager at Y's competitor?

How is the answer to question 3 particularly specific to company Z, and what incentive do they have to answer it honestly? And again, who's asking it?

How do these questions not go out of date? How do they accurately reflect company-wide practices? Why does anyone want to write answers to what sounds mostly like fanmail. ("Oh geez Acme Corp, you guys are so awesome, tell me how you run PostgreSQL at an enterprise scale!")

The way more plausible use case here is product support, which didn't even make your list of "possibly in the future", so I can only assume you really don't want Teams to be used that way.

This doesn't sound appealing at all to me. There's one aspect that nobody addresses: Why the hell would I want to tell my competitors how I manage my remote teams and my infrastructure?

I am happy to answer questions on Stack Overflow because I know that I do it on a personal level. I know that even if I reveal my super-technique to achieve X to one of my fellow developpers, I am not giving away this information to my competitors. I can help people all over the world without helping my competitor, and this is the paradox that makes Stack Exchange fantastic and a place where people never hesitate to share.

Many people out there do not reveal the name of the company they work for in their profile. They only say: I work on this, this, and that, I like this, I do this in my spare time and have this many years experience. The people that are prompt to show their company names are in general consultants. So your stuff is a no-go for me.

The other thing is, it is not solving any problem for the user, it is solving a problem for you. You want to create a social network, and you came up with this first step. When Stack Exchange becomes a social network or a LinkedIn bis, my reputation points won't have any kind of value to me. I am going to post all my questions as a Guest, and if you remove the Guest feature, I'll create dummy anonymous accounts on a regular basis. If I want a social platform, they're already plenty of them out there.

What you're doing here guys is trying to change your brand. But a brand cannot be changed, it can only be destroyed. I've long been thinking: the Stack Exchange model is solid, and I'm not sure where they're getting their money, but what I'm sure of is as long as they are funded, I don't see what could make them close the boutique. After reading this post and connecting the dots with Career, I have much less problems to imagine an Internet without Stack Overflow in 10 years.

I don't really follow all the "social network" accusations that are being throwing around in this thread. Talking about technical things with our photo next to it is what we already do, no? And SO's Careers angle has been around since... forever. Even if they implemented all their new ideas next month (and their only motivation were to satisfy their investors), would any of it actually be LinkedIn or Facebook-level evil? Hardly. But some fair points otherwise, especially about there being much fewer "teams" out there that are willing (or allowed) to share their internal workings
– PekkaOct 10 '15 at 23:02

You're casting this as a Stack Overflow project, which makes a lot of sense, but I hope you'll think about how it interacts with other sites from the start, even if you don't implement anything for a while (or ever). For some teams, Server Fault or DBA or Programmers may be as relevant as SO, and sites like Quality Assurance or Project Management or The Workplace might also be relevant. I hope a team page could, ultimately, have visibility from, and questions on, other sites on the network too.

This is definitely on ours minds - there are communities we see it making sense and others where it doesn't. We're aiming for Stack Overflow first but by virtue of our multi-tenant architecture the other communities can be done "for free" if the styles and such are done and ready. We'll want to prove it out first, though.
– Nick Craver♦Oct 6 '15 at 20:30

5

Right, it makes sense to beta-test on one site, and SO is clearly the site. It'd be sad to try to branch out later and find then that the architecture got in the way, though -- we don't want different, unlinked pages for the same team on multiple sites. So the goal of my post here is long-term design and it sounds like you're already there, so cool. Thanks.
– Monica CellioOct 6 '15 at 20:32

"What's a typical budget for [Company Y] when they upgrade their data centers?", or

"How does [Company Z] keep their distributed team working together even though they’re spread across multiple time zones?"

I like the motivation of providing a space for these sorts of questions -- I agree that they come up a lot, are currently off-topic for SO, and could be of broad interest (for many companies I would find each of these questions more interesting than the average hot network post). Another sort of question I see all the time is "Why did [Open Source Software Project A] make [Design Decision B]?" Often these questions can only be answered by members of the project, and teams would give the opportunity to gain insights (assuming a team was formed for the project).

That being said, I think a key ingredient of this would be letting teams control what are on-topic questions for the team. If any question about the team is fair game, I would imagine we could pretty quickly veer into not-so-great territory (asking personal questions about individual team members comes to mind).

Yeah, I think this is gonna be essential; if nothing else, a team question that no one on the team will answer is just noise.
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 21:40

1

On the other hand, giving Teams too much autonomy over the question topics risks making this a back-door for creating your own Stack Exchange sub-site. There would have to be guidelines for what on-topic guidelines are on-topic, which is making my head hurt a bit.
– IMSoPOct 6 '15 at 21:53

@IMSoP yeah, some baseline rules seem in order, but I would imagine different teams will have very different questions they're willing to answer (in much the same way that different types of conversations are valid in different chat rooms). I think teams would need some autonomy over "team question rules" (just like chat rooms have their room rules).
– josliber♦Oct 6 '15 at 21:57

Maybe chat is a reasonable analogue here, @josilber: you don't have to talk about programming all the time, but if you're creating a room to talk about nazi fetishes you can expect flags and deletion. OTOH, if your room is people talking about node and someone spams their PHP questions... You can kick 'em out, no questions asked.
– Shog9Oct 6 '15 at 22:02

2

@Shog9 I would be a happy camper if we had teams self-moderate like we do in chat (set the "team question rules" and kick those who don't follow the rules), coupled with normal moderation for clearly bad stuff (spam/offensive).
– josliber♦Oct 6 '15 at 22:10

3

@josilber At this point our current thinking is that Team admins will be able to self-moderate. If team admins become drunk with such power in their fiefdom, then we will have to address the issue at that time.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:12

2

I think the main problem is that any sensible company would answer those 3 questions with "that's none of your business".
– LundinOct 8 '15 at 7:02

@Lundin I'm sure many teams would answer such questions (especially #3, which doesn't seem too sensitive) and many teams would not. That's the whole point of my answer -- teams should be able to control what questions are on topic.
– josliber♦Oct 8 '15 at 15:57

Disputes?

What if I create a Stack Overflow team, or GitHub team, or whatever team that I don't have anything to do with? Sure, this is easy if the impersonated company is famous, but that's not the case for everybody.

Yes, we will have a way to handle disputes. No, we don't have those details ironed out right now. For now all we're looking to do is see how people would use Teams within a private beta. We'd rather test out how people use the feature first before racing to create rules around it based on how we assume people will use it.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 12:32

I foresee a large issue where a team starts up and is abandoned at some point. They stop answering questions. They stop adding members. They stop doing anything related to that team at all. In the end, it results in people asking questions that will never be seen nor answered.

My suggestion is relatively simple. After 30/60/90/whatever days of no questions answered (and, perhaps, having had questions asked during that period to avoid unpopular teams being flagged), a team is made inactive. The team page still exists and all the questions still exist, but no new questions can be answered and anyone viewing the page will be shown that this team is inactive and perhaps give a way to nudge them out of slumber (a way to send a notification to them, with strict limits on how many are actually sent out. Maybe 1 a week?).

This way, you don't end up with askers going to the team page for a company, asking how they handle something, and never getting a reply. It will happen, obviously, but this would minimize the chance of it happening repeatedly.

I'm concerned about the quality of Team Questions and how to handle them with minimal effort.

Some Team Pages, from popular companies/projects, will attract tons of spammers and trolls. To avoid this, please, consider the following:

Meta requires 5 rep to post. Please, set a rep requirement for posting Team Questions, at least of 5-10 rep. Shog9 called the attention to the fact that some companies will create their pages and will disappear after the novelty wears off. If they'll not care about the quality of their Team Questions, neither will the community. So, to avoid trolls and spammers, please set a privilege for posting there.

Give mod powers for team members to be able to easily handle crappy Team Questions. If they own the Team Page and are worried about the quality of the questions, make their life easier with the power to close/delete questions. Requiring 6 spam flags to remove a post will suck.

What if someone asks a coding question on a team page?
- There will be an easy way to move it into regular Q&A.

I'm not sure a rep requirement for asking questions is the right gate for this; I'd much prefer a rep requirement for creating a team in the first place, since that demonstrates some commitment to actually participating on Stack Overflow! There are probably better ways to control spam/abuse from askers, starting with rate-limits (and the various detection mechanisms found in our existing system) and probably ending with the ability for team members to block specific askers entirely (which should of course feed into the same spam/abuse-prevention systems).
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 1:20

1

@Shog9, ok, I've lowered my rep suggestion to 5-10rep. Let's trust in the current SO mechanisms to avoid spam/trolls, but no rep requirement will be really bad. Some companies like Google/Apple/Microsoft will attract thousands of haters, trolls and "funny" people. I believe that will be much more that we are used to handle.
– ZanonOct 7 '15 at 2:25

1

@Zanon We understand that we will attract spammers and trolls, and as issues arise we will address them. This is a private beta for now so all those rules don't need figured out right now. They will need to be figured before we release this to everyone. To address the mod powers comment—team member admins will have "mod powers" for their team.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 12:56

If final authority on the content of a team's page is given to the team, many pages would likely fall below an acceptable quality level.

If final authority is given to the community, then surely many groups would choose to avoid creating a team page, for fear that it would expose content that they prefer not be public.

How can you mix community moderation with corporate ownership? Either the community is unable to uphold standards, or any company which creates a page exposes themselves to the risk of their message going off-track.

As I told josilber yesterday, I think chat offers a useful model here - everything is owned by its author, moderated by the room then the community.
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 15:21

3

@Shog9 But in this case, a company would hypothetically be pointing to its SO page from, say, its own website. And if someone followed that link and saw a valid question with a problematic answer (ie: company x doesn't have a procedure in place to deal with the risk of y), then who would delete it? Would the company have the right to delete valid questions, thus turning the whole thing into a bit of a marketing farce?
– Grade 'Eh' BaconOct 7 '15 at 15:26

I'm much more sceptical of this idea than of the documentation idea. The use case for this seems to be non-existent, and the example questions seem to cover nearly anything one would ask that would be of benefit to a wider community. If someone wants to ask something more specific then I hear email has really taken off.

Other than the questions the use is covered by a multitude of other services already available, meaning it would introduce fragmentation, not coalescence.

I just thought: Is this a way to replace Stack Exchange for companies? For example, such as a Ubuntu team on unix.stackexchange.com instead of askubuntu.org.

Can you give me more info on this email thing you talk about? Sounds interesting.
– PekkaOct 9 '15 at 8:45

1

@AlexHall 1. Q&A -> covered my opinion by my original answer I believe. 2. Show off professionally -> careers.stackoverflow.com, linkedin.com, github.com, dribbble.com, I could continue ad nauseam. 3. Hiring or recruitment -> See 2 for the most part, there are a lot of fairly decent recruitment sites out there. The things left wrong with recruitment is, IMHO, down to recruiters and HR dept.s, not the online tools.
– TobyOct 9 '15 at 9:20

1

@Pekka웃 It's something to do with this whole internet malarky. you might need one of those disks from AOL and a program called a browser (check your computer has enough RAM!) home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html
– TobyOct 9 '15 at 9:29

1

@Toby nah, I'm not getting into that. It's going to blow over in a year or two, mark my words.
– PekkaOct 9 '15 at 18:52

1

@Toby “The things left wrong with recruitment is, IMHO, down to recruiters and HR dept.s, not the online tools.” – That’s so true. And I fear that this idea will just get those people directly on SO (into teams); and I’m not sure if that’s a good idea at all.
– pokeOct 12 '15 at 6:58

I don't know if this will work well for large organizations. In your examples, you listed Microsoft Excel as a way for organizations to break into more manageable team sizes. Well, I work on a big product along with hundreds of other people. But I don't think the product itself would make for a good team.

I don't know most of those people and I doubt they know me. We'd just be a mass of hundreds of faces in a crowd, not really a great representation of "who is working with you" nor a good way to indicate to job applicants what their team would be like. Even though there are some commonalities across groups in a large company, some aspects of the culture can vary all the way down to the manager level. Some technical solutions may even vary because different groups have different priorities.

I believe it would be difficult to provide general answers to questions, and it's likely you'd end up with only a handful of users on a large team actually answering them, if we were even allowed to answer them at all. Many things we simply couldn't discuss or would need official approval.

At the same time, I think creating teams at the feature level (which more closely aligns with the group of coworkers I associate with) would result in a lot of teams that are too small. Looking around the SE network, for many feature teams there just isn't a high volume of existing Q&A traffic for those features, which suggests there wouldn't be a lot of public interest for their teams here. You'd also end up with a lot of duplicate questions cross-posted across the team sites.

What kind of team size are you expecting would benefit from this most?

What would you consider a team that is too small? We imagine most teams will be smaller (15 people or less) and most likely within the 2-5 person range. Also why is that too small? The team's content will not only be questions. It's one of many content types we're considering.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 13:01

3

@Hynes Small teams make the fragmentation that people are fearing even worse. If every group of 2-5 people can make up their own Q&A moderation rules, publish their own choice of "artifacts", etc, it's going to be hard to cultivate a community between teams, and that feels very alien to the open, collaborative, Stack Exchange model.
– IMSoPOct 7 '15 at 20:02

@Hynes Small teams in and of themselves aren't necessarily bad. But breaking a large product into smaller teams would create a lot of duplication and confusion. I'd say 2-5 people is about the size I'm thinking of, but depending on employee SO participation, you could have anywhere from a dozen to two hundred feature teams for one product. That's kind of a logistical headache - people asking questions to the wrong team, managing shared content and keeping it in sync across teams, keeping everything up to date, preventing ghost towns as employees transfer across teams or leave, etc.
– TroyenOct 8 '15 at 0:39

@IMSoP Why would we allow every group to make up their own mod rules?
– HynesOct 8 '15 at 1:25

@Troyen if we have 12-200 teams for 1 product then we will gladly find a way to address the issues you mention. Teams becoming "ghost towns" is a concern, but a team also does it to their own detriment. It's how they appear on SO. They created the page. If they choose to ignore it, doesn't that tell you something about the team? If these areas become a bit long in the tooth, then the product team needs to find ways to engage those teams again.
– HynesOct 8 '15 at 1:30

2

@Hynes Have you actually read the other discussions on the page? It's been repeatedly stated that teams will be moderators in their own page, and free to set On-Topic rules for their own Q&A.
– IMSoPOct 8 '15 at 8:15

All your cons are things we'd like to avoid as well. Thanks for sharing.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 15:42

7

This seems very accurate from the view of a company, but it raises the question again: I see all the advantages for the companies, but I'm still missing the advantages to the SO community and broader developer community in general.
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 21:03

@Linuxios I think the advantage for the community from companies is in the collection and discussion of industry best practices. The advantage for the community from open source projects are the questions like "Why did you do it this way?", which may lead to other projects. Finally, most of us work on a team and insight into how other teams work may help your team.
– JesuismeOct 7 '15 at 23:23

3

@Jesuisme: I understand. However, as far as I know "What is the industry practice for XYZ?" is considered on-topic already, assuming XYZ is a programming, and not a team-management problem, which would go to Workplace, or Programmers.
– LinuxiosOct 7 '15 at 23:28

Good point Linuxios. While there are some answers that will cover those questions, there are often nuances and departures from accepted practices that exist. And I think we will find that even though we all code, different application areas have different styles, team dynamics, and "go-to" methods. But you may end up being right in the end, depending on how we use and respond to Teams.
– JesuismeOct 7 '15 at 23:51

@Jesuisme: Probably true. I guess the team is determined to go through with this though, so we'll find out!
– LinuxiosOct 8 '15 at 4:25

I develop an opensource library and start working on it and other software with friends. However, none of us have still enough points to create a tag with the name of our library, so we can follow it and immediately answer questions about usage of our library. Having a team is the perfect place to point people to ask questions "If any question on usage arise ask on our team page on Stack Overflow".

The Stack Overflow voting system is much better than anything I saw on the web, and I would prefer to use a Stack Overflow page instead of using a Google Groups group (it can still have its use of course).

Another nice feature would allow to see the combined reputation of all Stack Exchange sites on team pages (of course decreased by 100 for each site) that are marked pertinent to team page.

When you answer on a pertinent Stack Exchange site, you can choose one among the teams you belong to and use that as signature pointing to your team page.

That will automatically incentivate users to still answer and post questions just because that will may attract users to a team (well, many may dislike that because that's equivalent to spamming, but many users already spam "their library", and the signature size may change anyway, something like a small icon or text beside the name).

Except for the signature bit (maybe in a user card?), this is exactly right - I think a lot of folks struggle with this right now, and there's no obvious entrypoint for it. The tag thing is an aspect I hadn't even thought of, but is worth further consideration: what are we gonna do for tags in team questions?
– Shog9Oct 7 '15 at 14:41

I think a team could both import tags from related exchange sites, and create tags. I really like the feature of tagging issues on github with custom (and COLORED) tags in example. Definitely using custom tags would help for teams (how many tags are allowed and who is allowed to create tags within a team need certainly to be refined) maybe the limits on tags of the team may depend on how active the team is on related exchange sites?
– CoffeDeveloperOct 7 '15 at 15:23

When a new question is created, the team will be notified through
their inbox that a new question has come in. [...] Once notified,
anyone on the team can answer the question.
[emphasis mine]

If I understand correctly, this means that only team members will be allowed to answer questions and also to edit answers? (Note that if this assumption is false, then the rest of this answer is superfluous. Anyway - this important aspect should certainly be mentioned more explicitly in the proposal.)

If this is true, then the team feature seems to me a bit like a mini Stack Exchange site, where only moderators may answer questions. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that should be reasoned about. After all one of the main reasons for the success of Stack Overflow and the high quality Q/A is, that both questions and answers get created and moderated entirely by a community-driven process of thousands of people.

Some aspects to consider:

How would the quality of the answers scale, if only a handfull of team members are allowed to answer and edit answers?

What happens, when a team member leaves the company of the team - will she still be able to answer questions? Will she still be able to edit her answers?

Let's say there is a question about a specific library a team developed, and the accepted top answer is actually only promoting the awesomeness of said library. Would I, as a user of the library, have some way of proposing an answer that relativates this from a user perspective? If yes, who would decide if an answer is a good fit for the team site? The (most likely biased) team members? The moderators?

If information gets outdated - will I, not being a team member, be able to propse edits to update an answer? Who is deciding if an edit gets accepted?

Will everyone have the ability to flag answers, vote for close/reopen etc? Again - who has the last say?

Not that I am too concerned about all that - I think the team feature could provide very interesting and useful functionality for the community if done right.

These are all great questions, so thanks for sharing. At this point what we like about team questions is that it's a way for people to inquire about a team. It's one aspect of Teams. It's not the aspect. We actually foresee projects being a bigger feature here. All the issues that you mention are valid concerns which we will need to explore the further we get into this. We're hesitant about laying down too many additional rules too quickly. Rules are meant to guide behavior, but before we can guide it, we want to understand how people use it first.
– HynesOct 7 '15 at 12:44

Sounds like SO trying to be LinkedIn and searching for revenue opportunities while careers.stackoverflow.com is languishing.
– ΚαrτhικOct 15 '15 at 13:26